The General Prosecutor’s Office of the State of Ecuador is processing seven people – four active-duty military personnel and three security guards – for their alleged participation in the crime of illicit trafficking of substances classified as subject to control, after they were apprehended on the night of last Monday, September 8, at the Naportec Port Terminal in the south of Guayaquil.
According to the information and detention report, personnel from the National Police’s Anti-Narcotics Unit detected the contamination of a container of export tuna preserves with a shipment of drugs destined for France and Belgium.
In sector C of the port facility, the agents identified a suspicious container and, upon inspecting it, found several black sacks containing 432 rectangular blocks packaged with adhesive tape, presumably cocaine.
Following the discovery, tracking began through security cameras, which recorded the alleged participation of four Marines, who allegedly broke the security seals to introduce the drugs into the container, with the collaboration of private guards from the terminal.
Two of the uniformed personnel were apprehended inside the port facilities aboard an institutional vehicle; a third was apprehended at the Valdivia Judicial Unit while giving his statement to the Prosecutor’s Office; and the fourth was located in a room designated for military personnel rest within the same port.
The three security guards assigned to the day shift of the incident were also detained. The operation seized firearms, ammunition, cell phones, and other evidence linked to the case.
The confiscated drugs – weighing 491.6 kilograms of cocaine – had various logos and identifying texts on the outside, such as “BTC”, “Mercedes Benz”, “212”, “0924”, “Dior”, and “Balmain Paris”.
In the hearing for the classification of flagrancy and formulation of charges, the case prosecutor presented the collected elements of conviction, including the information and apprehension report, the version of the apprehending agents, the homologated preliminary identification test, the drug verification and weighing report, four security seals from the container (two wire and two bottle-type), the exploitation and extraction of information from cell phones, among others.
The on-duty Criminal Guarantees Judge accepted the Prosecutor’s Office’s request and ordered preventive prison for José Israel B. M., Luis Aurelio R. Y., Ricardo Eduardo G. P., Carlos Julio N. O. (military personnel); Edgar Vicente V. C., José Daniel F. T., and Ángelo Cristóbal A. M. (security guards). The closure of the fiscal investigation will be in thirty days.
